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The WCS Working Paper Series is designed to share with the conservation and development communities in a timely fashion information from the various settings where WCS works. These papers address issues that are of immediate importance to helping conserve wildlife and wild lands either through offering new data or analyses relevant to specific conservation settings, or through offering new methods, approaches, or perspectives on rapidly evolving conservation issues. The findings, interpretations, and conclusions expressed in the papers are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Wildlife Conservation Society.

WCS Working Paper No. 06 - Projets integres de conservation et de developpement: Un cadre pour promouvoir la conservation et la gestion des ressources naturallesAuthor(s): Paul Ferraro, Richard Tshombe, Robert Mwinyihali, John Hart
Year: 1996
Description/Abstract: This report summarizes the proceedings of a workshop held at the Centre de Formation et de Recherche en Conservation Forestière (CEFRECOF) at Epulu, in the Okapi Wildlife Reserve, northeastern Zaire from 15 - 18 August, 1996. The general problem dealt with was “How effective are Integrated Conservation and Development Projects (ICDPs) at furthering nature conservation objectives?” Specifically, the workshop presented an analytical framework to assist project leaders to foresee and evaluate the impact of ICDPs on protected areas and natural resource use. Over thirty individuals participated in the workshop. They represented both governmental departments, and non-governmental organizations involved in nature conservation and development activities in eastern Zaire.
It is increasingly appreciated that rural residents living within or adjacent to protected areas are major agents of destructive change to the biodiversity and natural resources of these protected areas. The long term sustainability of protected areas will depend upon the support of rural communities. The design of projects that generate behaviors supporting protected areas and favoring management of their natural resources is not well understood.
The framework presented in this report identifies those interventions that link the wellbeing of rural communities with the objectives of biodiversity conservation. The analysis focuses on the level of the household and the specific ways in which interventions can affect household behaviors. These include interventions that encourage investment of labor and capital to reduce negative impacts on biological resources; interventions to enhance the use of biological resources in ways that are nondestructive; interventions that educate households in the benefits of conservation, and interventions that alter preferences. To successfully promote conservation, the choice by a household for behaviors favorable to conservation must exclude options to invest labor or capital in behaviors that have a negative impact on nature conservation.
The workshop applied the analytical framework to case studies drawn from the literature as well as to projects presented by the non-governmental organizations collaborating with the Zaire National Parks Institute.
Publisher: Wildlife Conservation Society

WCS Working Paper No. 15 - Mesocarnivores of northeastern North America: Status and conservation issuesAuthor(s): Justina C. Ray
Year: 2000
Description/Abstract: Members of the order Carnivora form a unique mammalian group from an historical perspective. They have been subject to centuries of persecution and exploitation—maligned and feared as predators, but valued for their fur coats. They also have exhibited remarkable resilience in the face of such pressures (Schaller 1996). This paper discusses the principal conservation issues facing mesocarnivores in northeastern North America, followed by detailed accounts for each of 14 species that summarize the status and distribution of each, and review what is known about their habitat associations and responses to human-induced disturbance. It takes an historical perspective, and focuses upon issues that are salient and unique to the region.
Publisher: Wildlife Conservation Society

WCS Working Paper No. 16 - Adirondack communities and conservation program: Linking communities and conservation inside the blue lineAuthor(s): Heidi Kretser
Year: 2001
Description/Abstract: The Adirondack Communities & Conservation Program (ACCP) takes an information-based approach to understanding socio-economic and political factors in the regional conservation equation within the Adirondack Park. The intended result is an integrated approach to problem identification and resolution. A number of participatory studies and cooperative activities have provided constructive points of entry into selected communities located inside the Park. This report synthesizes the findings from three community case studies and a broader tourism study and identifies links among community development efforts, the supporting natural environment, and conservation issues in the Adirondack Park.
Publisher: Wildlife Conservation Society

WCS Working Paper No. 17 - The ecology of northeast coyotes: Current knowledge and priorities for future researchAuthor(s): Matthew E. Gompper
Year: 2002
Description/Abstract: When Europeans first settled North America, wolves and puma dominated the large-predator community of the eastern deciduous forests. The coyote was a resident of the Great Plains and western North America and was unknown to settlers of the east. These days, puma are virtually extirpated east of the Mississippi, and aside from a handful of red wolves reintroduced in the southeastern United States and possibly an occasional transient gray wolf in the Northeast, wolves are also effectively absent. In contrast, coyotes are now found from Nova Scotia to Florida and exist at high enough population densities in virtually every region to have become an important component of the ecological community. Therefore a solid understanding of coyote ecology is necessary for conservation planning at many levels. This paper summarizes what is known of the ecology of coyotes in northeastern North America (including New England, New York and Canada east of the Ontario-Québec border), and identifies areas of research requiring immediate attention. While much is known regarding coyote natural history and ecology in this region, there are also major gaps in our knowledgebase. In particular, four aspects of coyote ecology are suggested as priorities for future research:
• The demographics and growth rates of the northeastern coyote populations.
• The role of northeastern coyotes in structuring communities.
• The important parasites and diseases of northeastern coyotes.
• The impact of wolf-coyote hybridization on the population genetics and ecology of northeastern coyotes.
A focus on these research areas will allow for informed management decisions in the face of an array of conservation priorities in the Northeast.
Publisher: Wildlife Conservation Society

WCS Working Paper No. 25 - Natural alliances between conservationists and indigenous peoplesAuthor(s): Kent H. Redford, Michael Painter
Year: 2006
Description/Abstract: The survival of both indigenous peoples and much of what remains of nature lies in the ability of both sides to find common ground. However, parks and protected areas have become the focus of conflict between conservationists and indigenous peoples. This antipathy is based on differing views about the nature of human impact on the natural world and masks the strong potential for these two groups to work together. In this paper we provide a case study illustrating how effective such cooperation can be. The Kaa-Iya del Gran Chaco National Park and Integrated Management Area was designed and implemented as the result of a collaboration between the Wildlife Conservation Society and the Capitanía de Alto y Bajo Izozog, the organization representing the 10,000 Guaraní people known as Isoceños. The park, encompassing approximately 3.5 million hectares of Bolivian Chaco, is the only national park in the Americas established on the initiative of a Native American People, and the only one where a Native American organization shares primary administrative responsibilities with the national government.
Publisher: Wildlife Conservation Society

WCS Working Paper No. 26 - Poverty, development, and biodiversity conservation: Shooting in the dark?Author(s): Arun Agrawal, Kent Redford
Year: 2006
Description/Abstract: Poverty alleviation and biodiversity conservation are basic social goals and part of the policy agenda of postcolonial states and international agencies. It is not surprising therefore that a large number of programmatic interventions have aimed to achieve the two goals at the same time. These interventions are funded by governments, conservation NGOs, bilateral and multilateral donor agencies, and private sector organizations. In this paper, we first examine the concep¬tual discussion around poverty and biodiversity, and then analyze three such interventions: community-based wildlife management, extractive reserves, and ecotourism. Our discussion shows that the literature on these programmatic interventions depends on relatively simplified understandings of poverty and biodiversity in stark contrast to the theoretical literature on the two concepts. Further, writings on programmatic interventions tend to operationalize poverty and biodiversity in distinct and quite different ways.
Our analysis focuses on peer-reviewed writings and finds that 34 of the 37 identified studies share two common features: a focus on processes and out¬comes in a single case and single time period, and a drastic simplification of the complex concepts of poverty and biodiversity. In addition, the cases we exam¬ine are relatively inattentive to the relationships between observed outcomes and the contextual features of programmatic interventions. As a result of these shared features, the mass of scholarly work on the subject does not permit sys¬tematic and context-sensitive generalizations about the conditions under which it may be possible to achieve poverty alleviation and biodiversity conservation simultaneously. The vast sums channeled toward joint achievement of poverty alleviation and biodiversity conservation are all the more remarkable in light of the basic lack of evidence on the extent to which these goals can jointly be reached. In conclusion, we discuss steps toward a rejuvenated research agenda for better knowledge and policies related to the links between poverty alleviation and biodiversity conservation.
Publisher: Wildlife Conservation Society

WCS Working Paper No. 42 - Using systematic monitoring to evaluate and adapt management of a tiger reserve in northern LAO PDRAuthor(s): Arlyne Johnson, Chanthavy Vongkhamheng, Santi Saypanya, Troy Hansel, Samantha Strindberg
Year: 2013
Description/Abstract: Although considerable effort and resources have been dedicated to biodiver¬sity conservation over the last three decades, the effectiveness of these conserva¬tion actions is still frequently unclear. Thus, practitioners are being called on to be ever more strategic in their use of often limited resources available for the scale of the work required. To address this problem, several frameworks have been developed to guide the practice of conservation and facilitate adaptive manage¬ment. Although these frameworks now exist and monitoring is key to adaptive management, there are still relatively few detailed examples of projects that have successfully implemented monitoring plans and then analyzed the data to gener¬ate results that were in turn used to adapt management. Reasons cited for this include insufficient funding for monitoring and evaluation, inappropriate monitor¬ing designs that are unable to generate results to answer management questions, ineffectively managed monitoring information, and institutional arrangements that do not facilitate the feedback of monitoring results (should they exist) to man¬agement. Given these challenges, there is a need for case studies that illustrate how monitoring and evaluation can be done in the context of the Open Standards for the Practice of Conservation to support learning and provide evidence for the effectiveness of a conservation action. This paper provides a detailed case study of adaptive management in practice. In this case the Wildlife Conservation Society’s Landscape Species Approach was used over a seven-year period to plan, execute, evaluate and adapt a project to recover wild tigers Panthera tigris and their ungu¬late prey (Gaur Bos gaurus, Southwest China serow Capricornis milneedwardsii, Sambar deer Cervus unicolor, wild pig Sus spp., and muntjacs Muntiacus spp.) in Lao PDR. After several iterations of the project management cycle, we assess to what degree the framework supported rigorous monitoring and evaluation that was used to inform and adapt management and what conditions were present and/or needed to overcome the constraints that commonly impede the practice of adaptive management in conservation.
Publisher: Wildlife Conservation Society

WCS Working Paper No. 45 - An annotated bibliography of camera trap literature, 1991-2013Author(s): Timothy O'Brien
Year: 2015
Description/Abstract: The growth of camera trapping as a tool for monitoring and ecological studies has been exponential in the past 15 years. To help interested people find information on camera trap studies, this is a bibliography on camera trap publications in journals that are tracked by the Web of Science (accessed 5 November 2013 and 27 January 2014).
Publisher: Wildlife Conservation Society

WCS Working Paper No. 47 - Conserving and eating wildlife in AfricaAuthor(s): David S. Wilkie, Michelle Wieland
Year: 2015
Description/Abstract: Unsustainable hunting of wildlife for food risks: a) loss of an important source of dietary protein and income for many of the poorest families across sub-Saharan Africa (Bennett et al. 2007; Nasi et al. 2011), and b) emptying Africa’s forests and savannas of their wildlife and the loss of the important ecological roles these wildlife species play in the functioning and productivity of these ecosystems (Abernethy et al. 2013; Effiom et al. 2013; Lindsey et al. 2011; Nunez-Iturri & Howe 2007). Both the drivers of and solutions to unsustainable bushmeat hunting are largely known (Foerster et al. 2012; Forget & Jansen 2007; Laurance et al. 2006; Lindsey et al. 2013; Wilkie & Carpenter 1999; Wilkie et al. 2005; Wright et al. 2007), and they vary according to biome, market access and availability of substitutes, human population density and urbanization, and wildlife use rights and governance. This paper explores what we know current about the challenges to conserving and eating wildlife in Africa and offers some practical policies and practices to address these issues in both rural and urban contexts across Africa.
Publisher: Wildlife Conservation Society